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WhattheGRMbroughttomusic:frommusiqueconcrtetoacousmaticmusic

MarcBattier

OrganisedSound/Volume12/Issue03/December2007,pp189202DOI:10.1017/S1355771807001902,Publishedonline:30November2007

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Howtocitethisarticle:MarcBattier(2007).WhattheGRMbroughttomusic:frommusiqueconcrtetoacousmaticmusic.OrganisedSound,12,pp189202doi:10.1017/S1355771807001902

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What the GRM brought to music: frommusique concre`te to acousmatic music

MARC BATTIER

MINT, Maison de la recherche, Universite Paris-Sorbonne, 28, rue Serpente, F-75006 ParisE-mail: marc.battier@paris-sorbonne.fr

Sixty years ago, musique concre`te was born of the single-

handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the

first experiments become a School and produce so many rich

works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various

aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of

musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts

behind the advent and the development of the music created

and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the

Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the

early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and

how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest

for, as Apollinaire put it, new sounds new sounds new

sounds. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture,

processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly

revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is

known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as

Teruggis, give readers insight into the technical environments

and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present

article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This

unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and

dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant

attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and

philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in

shaping the development of GRM over the course of its

history.

To oppose noises, my own noise. This noise will then

repel all the others, those that are now, those that were

then, those of the day, collecting them through an

unprecedented wonder of nature.

Henri Michaux, 1950, Composing, Passages

1. INTRODUCTION

Electroacoustic music has marked a decisive stage in the

relationship between musician and composition. It

found its place in its first era at the heart of publicradiophonic studios, university-based or at any rate

lodged in private organisations. We know how it

blossomed out and succeeded in mastering some

industries technologies that were at first reluctant to

take it on; and at last, after many misadventures,

established a dialogue with the instrumental tradition.

Today, it knows how to harness the unimaginably

powerful techniques of musical computing. Moreover,the tradition established by Pierre Schaeffer at the end

of the 1940s, which was called the Paris School, is still

alive and the musical creations that it brings about have

the imprint that is their very own.

An approach to composition would evolve that

would be impregnated by a specific thought. Differing

from what was taking place in other great studios, the

Paris School advanced above all through concepts. It

was this wish to adhere to constantly reinforced theory

that gave the movement its unique character. That said,

electroacoustic composition, which was the basis of the

Paris School, followed the contours of historical

contingencies: technological evolution, relations to the

public, co-operation with the leading institutions; and

we must not forget the individual paths which tended to

branch off in unexpected ways influencing the flow of

artistic thinking.

If Pierre Schaeffer, in inventing musique concre`te, did

his best to give a conceptual status to the sound object,

other musicians, through their practice as much as

through their thinking, set out on new tracks or invented

new concepts, and from this also made theory-based

work: we can name as typical (in a list of composers that

must be incomplete) Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Guy

Reibel, Bernard Parmegiani, Ivo Malec, Michel Chion,

Alain Savouret, Francois Bayle, above all, then

Christian Zanesi and Daniel Teruggi. All have taken

on the thinking and some of them have forged new

concepts as well. I will try here to describe the vision of

the Paris School whilst presenting the break-up in terms

of its rapport with the music of the first half of the

twentieth century.

2. A SYMPHONY OF NOISES

As the Canadian composer Murray Shafer has shown,1

noises belong to the outside world, that of spaces, of

towns, of external acoustic spaces, just as the place of

music is indoors. It seeks for its best protection from

noises. The solution to this dilemma has been put

forward since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Italian Futurists (first Ballila Pratella, then Luigi

Russolo) advanced the suggestion that new music could

be based on turning the noises of the world into music.

1Raymond Murray Schafer. 1976.The Tuning of the World. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf.

Organised Sound 12(3): 189202 2007 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi: 10.1017/S1355771807001902

The idea of a symphony of everyday noises was also

expressed again and again in the first half of the last

century. Perhaps Schaeffer, a well-read man, was

familiar with the lines that Apollinaire had devoted in

his fiction Le Roi-Lune to a novel transduction

technique which King Ludwig II of Bavaria hadinvented using multiple microphones?

[The Moon-King] was seated in front of a keyboard, one

key of which he was applying with a weary air; and it

remained stuck, so that there came from one of the

pavilions a murmur both strange and continual. At first I

was unable to discern its meaning. The well-developed

microphones which the king had at his disposal were

regulated in such a manner as to bring into the cellar

noises of life on earth from the most far away places.

Now it is murmurs from the Japanese countryside2

Then, from another depressed key, we are transported in

mid-morning, the king hails the socialist hard work in

New Zealand, I can hear the whistling of geysers

Doum, doum, boum, doum, doum, boum, doum, doum,

boum, it is Peking, the gongs and drums of the patrols

The kings fingers run over the keys, haphazardly, raising

them up, in some fashion simultaneously, all the

murmurs of the world have just been made for us, as

we remain stationary, a tour by ear.3

Apollinaire called this group of living and natural

sounds from diverse sources a symphony made by the

world.4

The meteoric development of cities and industrialisa-

tion struck artists and musicians imaginations very

forcibly at the turn of the twentieth century, precipitat-

ing a waterfall of movements (the isms) which took

hold of them. With this, sounds from the world became

present in and part of composition: the sounds of

machinery which led Luigi Russolo to his famous

classification,5 the birds which inspired Messiaen, thezoomusicology of Francois-Bernard Mache, the sirens

and sound masses of Vare`se the examples are

numerous and very varied. And for Jean-Etienne

Marie, Schaeffer was defined as a naturalist with

natures sounds.6 All these approaches share in their

very different ways a holistic vision of the creative

imagination.

This interest in the sounds of the world is the pivot on

which concre`te invention turns, and beyond that, also a

great part of electroacoustic music, even if a significant

proportion of it is based on composition from synthetic

sounds. We need not concern ourselves here with sound

landscapes, which would be simplistic and more than

that, false, but chiefly with what Schaeffer himself

described thus: The sound object, which may be any

possible audible sound, is that which ranges from

natural sounds to the noises of civilisation, from animalcries to human words.7 That is to say, one takes external

sounds, and harnesses them to ensure their transduc-

tion. The instruments adapted to this effect are: the

microphone, or, more widely, the membrane that is

sensitive to acoustic vibrations and reconstitutes them,

through conversion, into another shape mechanical

for the first gramophones, electric thereafter; and the

recording and playback machine. Each of these stepshas contributed to modify our perception of sounds,

and where the need arises, to transform the sounds

themselves. For that, one must first become a phono-

graphist artist.

3. THE PHONOGRAPHIST MUSICIAN

Apollinaire was the first to declare that the gramophonecould become the instrument through which he would

create a vertical poetry, not declamatory but with

simultaneous action. He then proclaimed himself to be a

phonographist poet.8 The gramophone, an apparatus

conceived for recording and reproduction, is intriguing,

and one finds a considerable amount of people who

came upon the idea that it should be used as an

instrument for creation. In 1931, Boris de Schloezerexpressed the opinion that one could write for the

gramophone or for the wireless just as one can for the

piano or the violin.9 The music critic Andre Coeuroy, in

his 1928 Panorama of Contemporary Music, wrote

perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will be

able to represent through recording, music specifically

composed for the gramophone.10 For Henry Cowell,

referring to the projects of Nikolai Loptatnikoff, therewas no doubt that there was a wide field open for the

composition of music for phonographic discs.11 Even

Igor Stravinsky, who never created an electroacoustic

work, declared in 1930 in the revue Kultur und

Schalplatte There will be a greater interest in creating

2In an earlier version Apollinaire had written tous les chants (allthe songs) before changing it to toutes les rumeurs (all therumours/murmurs).

3Guillaume Apollinaire. 1977. Le Roi-Lune (19081916). InMichel Decaudin (ed.) Oeuvres en prose completes, volume 1.Paris: Gallimard, pp. 31316.

4Ibid., p. 316.5Luigi Russolo. 1913. LArt des bruits. The edition edited byMaurice Lematre and published by Richard-Masse (1954) is ofinterest for its famous (and unjustified) attack on Schaeffer by theessayist; the classification appears on p. 37. One may profitablyconsult the critical edition edited by Giovanni Lista, 2001, Paris:Lage dhomme.

6Jean-Etienne Marie. 1976. Lhomme musical. Paris: Arthaud, p. 19.

7Pierre Schaeffer. 1976. La musique par exemple. Cahiersrecherche/musique no, 2, Le Traite des objets musicaux 10 ansapre`s, p. 58.

8Guillaume Apollinaire. 1991. A propos de la poesie nouvelle, Paris-Journal, 29 juin 1914. In Pierre Caizergues and Michel Decaudin(eds) Oeuvres en prose comple`tes volume 2. Paris: Gallimard, p. 982.

9Can we compose special music for the phonograph and the radioand thus create a new art? As long as we consider the record onlyas a photograph, we compare it to the original and condemn itwhen it varies there from. But even these differences can acquirean aesthetic value. Boris de Schloezer. 1931. Man, music and themachine, Modern music, 8 (3): 9.

10Andre Coeuroy. 1928. Panorama de la musique Contemporaine,edition revue et augmentee. Paris: Kra, p. 162.

11Henry Cowell. 1931. Music of and for the records, Modern music8 (3): 34.

190 Marc Battier

music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophone

record. Lastly, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt discerned a

fundamental aspect of phonography, that it could exist

as music without having been created by an instrument;

Music impressed directly on to a disc is produced with

an ideal precision and without individual interpreta-

tion.12 This was the method by which the status of

authentic discs was made to appear. Stuckenschmidt,

however, was one of the first to underline an essential

difficulty, even though it is not completely an aporia.

According to him, there did not exist any specific system

adapted to such instruments as the gramophone.

Perhaps it would be necessary to create a graphic

alphabet which would allow sound to be impressed in

the form of signs engraved on the surface of the disc, an

idea that had already been expressed by Laszlo Moholy-

Nagy in 1923 in an article for Der Sturm.13

Finally, the symphony of the world has been

connected with phonography through the vision

expressed by the composer Carol-Berard in a passage

which evokes in a striking fashion the reflections that

Pierre Schaeffer would publish twenty years afterwards:

Why, and I have been asking this for fifteen years, are

phonograph records not taken of noises such as those of

a city at work, at play, even asleep? Of forests, whose

utterance varies according to their trees a grove of pines

in the Mediterranean mistral has a murmur unlike the

rustlle of poplars in a breeze from the Loire? Of the

tumult of the crowd, a factory in action, a moving train, a

railway terminal, engines, showers, cries, rumblings?14

Carol-Berard was one of the first to dream of how this

question of sound which is both varied and shapeless,

this assemblage of differentiated noises, would come to

exert its influence on them in their musical creations.

Experience with the microphone, or more generally

with sound recording, has sent those who discovered it

down a new route. In December 1913 Apollinaire, along

with other poets, visited the Archives of the Voice at the

Sorbonne and recorded three poems there.15 The poet

said of this experience After the recording, they played

my poems back to me on the apparatus, and I did not

recognise my voice in the slightest.16 But it was his

friend Andre Salmon who gave the better description of

this blind listening:

He listens to himself, not without stupefaction. His

friends find his presence there, but he does not recognise

himself! Really, our profound organs of aural perception

experience enjoyment thanks to the gramophone when

it sends back to us this voice of its own which stifles,

when we speak, the said profound and very delicate

perceptions. The interior voices, Victor Hugo called

them, he who loved Professor Brunots invention.17 Thus

at the second hearing we heard ourselves, to summarise,

for the first time, and this gave us a lively surprise. After

Guillaume Apollinaire, we too knew this emotion, this

troubling, in listening to the singing of our double.18

Apropos this session, here follows another evocative

remark by Apollinaire much before the one inspired by

listening to this recorded sound. It was on the occasion

of poems recited by Rene Ghil the real great success of

this session.19 He remarked: One would say that the

sound of Aeolian harps vibrating in an Italian garden

and more than anything the hymn of telegraphy is

represented by the wires and poles that cease to mark

the trunk roads. In this way, the voice of the poet Rene

Ghil takes on, by its phonographic recording, the tone

of an aerial music.20

The technique of recording and of montage, which is

associated with cinematographic practice, came to serve

as the substrate of musique concre`te.21 For the cineaste

Jean Epstein, sound recording revealed what was

hidden in the act of simple acoustic listening:

the microphone and the loudspeaker transmit accents

with an unsupportable shamelessness, where all is

revealed: the navety of false pride, the sharp bitterness

that comes from success denied, the disquiet that

underlies self-assurance and laughter, all the feeblenesses

and all the slyness of a character who was thought of as

upright, sturdy, in control of himself. They are not many,

the priestly confessors who have been able to see and hear

as far into the soul as this glassy gaze and this all-listening

photo-electric cell!22

This phenomenon of an epiphanic being that appears

through the transduction of sound became the pedestal

of Schaeffers thinking named reduced listening.

According to Epstein, this was because of the way that

recorded sound distanced itself from the individual: But

the ghost also speaks, and with a voice that the living, in

all sincerity, does not recognise, which one cannot

12H.H. Stuckenschmidt. 1927. Machines a vision of the future,Modern music, 4 (3): 10.

13Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. 1923. Neue Gestaltung in der Musik.Moglichkeiten des Grammophons, Der Sturm 7. Reprinted inUrsula Block and Michael Glasmeier (eds) Broken Music. Berlin:Daadgalerie, Berliner Kunstlerprogramm des DAAD et gelbeMusik, 1989, pp. 556.

14Carol-Berard. 1929. Recorded noises Tomorrows instrumen-tation, Modern Music 6 (2): 28.

15Apollinaire recording Le Voyageur, Le Pont Mirabeau,Marie.

16Guillaume Apollinaire. 1977. Les Archives de la parole, La vieanecdotique, 1st July 1914. In P. Caizergues and M. Decaudin(eds) OEuvres en prose completes. Paris: Gallimard, p. 213.

17Ferdinand Brunot, founder in 1911 of the Archives de la parole.The laboratory was installed at the Sorbonne. Emile Patheprovided a phonographic recorder with a technician to work themachine. On his first visit in 1911, Apollinaire made an evocativecommentary in a chronicle called La Sorbonne est ebranlee.

18Andre Salmon, Plus de livres des disques !, Gil Blas, 25December 1913.

19Apollinaire, op. cit., p. 214.20Ibid.21For the role of radiophonics in Schaeffers thinking, see John

Dack, 1994, Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of RadiophonicArt, Conetmporary Music Review 10 (2): 311.

22Jean Epstein, 1946. LIntelligence dune machine. Ed. JacquesMelot. Paris.

What the GRM brought to music 191

recognise, because it has never been heard from the

outside, carried by a breath that is not ones own.23

Schaeffer explicitly cited Jean Epstein at the time of the

foundation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales,24

with reference to his use of extra-musical sounds. The

filmmaker, one can say, had already imagined that

through the transposition of natural sounds, it becomespossible to create chords and dissonances, melodies and

symphonies of noise, which are a new and specifically

cinematographic music.25

4. THE ORCHESTRATION OF NOISES

Twenty years before musique concre`te, the composer

Carol-Berard wrote:

If noises were registered [sic], they could be grouped,

associated and carefully combined as are the timbres of

the instruments in an orchestra, although with a different

technique. We would then create symphonies of noise

that would be grateful to the ear. There are plenty of

symphonies today which are anything but agreeable,

while there are at large and unregistered, a myriad of

delightful sounds the voices of the waves and trees, the

moving cry of a sailing vessels rigging, an airplane

gliding down, the natural choruses of frogs around a

pool.26

If the holistic vision leads one to consider the noises of

the world, the vision of musicians will converge very

shortly with the question of how noises are orchestrated.

Recording, one knows, provides the sonic material from

which the musician creates his work. To those ongramophone records, Schaeffer gave the name, frag-

ments. For Marina Scriabine, it was a question of

documents;27 these, says Scriabine, are then manipu-

lated before one has the power to structure them. But the

determining factor for Schaeffer was to make evident

the creative role related to the perception of sounds,

once these had passed through the tube of the

microphone. Musique concre`te was to be founded onthe hypothesis that there exists a domain beyond the

sounds:28 it is by recording the noises of things, and

then by the operation of capturing sounds through a

microphone, that we can attain it. The sound signal

collected by the microphone and reconstructed by the

loudspeaker crosses space without preserving the image

of the original sounding object. Listening is then

favoured by the absence of visual stimuli; it is

concentrated, and perception converges better than

that, it is reduced to that pure listening. Concerning the

microphone, Schaeffer asserted that without changing

the sound, it transforms the experience of listening.29

The microphone tells strange things, said Luc Ferrari,

it gathers a straw from the eye of its neighbour and

makes a beam from it.30

Schaeffer was supremely fascinated by the mystery of

recording, for it operates within a remarkable differ-

entiation between what is conceived (the sounding

body) and what is perceived what he called the

separator power, but one that is also sensitive to

manipulation. In his text of 1946 he discusses the

question of the transformation of time perceived

through recording. In this way he invokes the simple

ways that alteration in chronological time is used in

cinema. However, his inquisitive mind led him to

denounce the limits of slowing and reversing the film.

This observation demonstrates a clear knowledge of the

techniques of manipulation, which he would himself

exploit two years later.31 But Schaeffer had had also

benefited from an experience that was rare, at least at

that time. The development of his thinking had

primarily been formed by encountering the voice of

actors and the microphone. Before him, Rudolf

Arnheim had fully noted the effects of microphonic

recording in his 1936 essay Radio, in which the idea of a

creative role for this medium was introduced. The

rediscovery of the musicality of sound in noise and in

language, and the reunification of music, noise and

language in order to obtain a unity of material: that is

one of the chief artistic tasks of radio.32

The mastery of noises turned out to be more delicate

than had been foreseen when it was first thought of.33

The noises of the world are at the outset presented to our

perception as signals, manifestations of something

strange to which we should lend our attention. They

are decoded within the instant with the intention of

ascertaining their cause: isolated, selected and identified,

their origin important to us because they can be

significant agents of our environment. Schaeffer, in his

first statements, gave priority to the masking of the

cause by the effect of the transduction. However, noises

can be resistant to this operation. As Schaeffer observed

in the preface of his five first studies in June 1948,34 there

is no doubt that certain of them could eventually

23Ibid.24The Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) was founded in

1958.25Quoted by Pierre Schaeffer, 1959, Images et mouvement, La

revue musicale no. 244, Experiences musicales, p. 66.26Carol-Berard. 1929. Recorded noises Tomorrows instrumenta-

tion, Modern Music 6 (2): 28.27Marina Scriabine. 1963. Le langage musical. Paris: Les editions de

Minuit, p. 204.28Pierre Schaeffer. 1970. Notes sur lexpression radiophonique

(1946). In Machines a`communiquer, volume 1, Gene`se dessimulacres. Paris: Seuil, p. 109.

29See Pierre Schaeffer, 1994, Notes sur lexpression radiophonique(1946), reprinted in Dix ans dessais radiophoniques, du Studio auClub dEssai, 1942/1952, Arles: Phonurgia nova, p. 88.

30Luc Ferrari. 1959. Les etapes de la production, La revue musicaleno. 244, Experiences musicales, p. 54.

31See Pierre Schaeffer, op. cit, p. 95.32Rudolf Arnheim, Radio (1936), translated into French from the

German by Martin Kaltenecker, Paris: Van Fieren, 2005, p. 57.33For a presentation of noise in musical composition during the

twentieth century see Pierre-Albert Castanet, Tout est bruit pourqui a peur, Michel de Maule, 1999, passim.

34Pierre Schaeffer, Presentation du Concert de bruits, Sunday 20June 1948, ClubdEssai, p. 3.

192 Marc Battier

become a sound object because their anecdotal char-

acter can be masked; others, in contrast, keep their

dramatic character and it is not possible, at least

through the technology available to the Club

dEssai, to erase recognition of their cause com-

pletely. Later, Schaeffer would assert that there was

no difference, only nuances, between musical sound

and noise.35

The concre`te approach is not without recall of the

theoretical protocol of the Russian Constructivists, and

in particular their insistence on the idea of faktura.36

Alexei Gan, following the example of other artists of

this movement, distinguished three disciplines in the

artistic practice of Constructivism: the tectonic, suggest-

ing a theoretical framework which determines the

direction for artistic activity; the faktura, which defines

how one approaches the material which allows one to

proceed to the construction, that is to say the putting into

shape. The aspect that leads to the concre`te approach is

faktura, which Gan further defined as work on the

material in its entirety, and not just on its surface. To

make this real, one must apply a particular technique,

which allows one to increase the possibilities of

transformation of the material with which one begins.

The faktura is therefore defined as a material knowingly

chosen and rationally deployed. Schaeffers thinking

led him to define the process of concre`te composition

which consists of extracting from the material

regarded as a sound object the possibility of updating

those properties which would serve to mould the

musical object. This was through a process compar-

able to the faktura of Constructivism, which

Schaeffer implemented to turn the sound event, still

impressed with its dramatic stamp, into the musical

object, material that was pure sound. Furthermore,

with Pierre Henry, a composer of this new music,

there came a detachment from the power of

predetermined sounds in order to be able to shape

a new material:

musique concre`te was not a study of timbre, it is focused

on envelopes, forms. It must be presented by means of

non-traditional characteristics, you see one might say

that the origin of this music is also found in the interest in

plastifying music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture

musique concre`te, in my opinion, has led to a manner of

composing, indeed, a new mental framework of compos-

ing.37

5. PROVIDING A FRAMEWORK TO MUSICAL

RESEARCH

The life of Pierre Schaeffer (191095) has been fully

documented.38 His studies at the Ecole Polytechnique,

his passion as much for the violin as for literature, his

ever increasing responsibilities at the heart of the

institution of radio all that is as well- known as are

the aspects of his complex and at times disturbing

character. It came about that musique concre`te would

be invented by a man of many gifts but who neither had

nor claimed to have the status of composer. In the

course of the 1950s, when his professional role of

responsibility for radio led him to make prolonged stays

abroad, Schaeffer would pursue his ideas, developing

since 1948. As one often finds in his writings, his

suggestions are worked out in the form of lists, laying

down what he found appropriate as a stance, and

rejecting what appeared to him to fall outside its

domain.

Having made its first appearance without a prede-

fined status, musique concre`te received an institutional

embodiment from the beginning of October 1951, with

the creation of the Groupe de recherches de musique

concre`te within the Radio-Televison francaise. It was

thus that the two first historic studios were created

simultaneously, for it was also in October 1951 that the

studio of the NWDR was founded in Cologne!

The international influence of musique concre`te was

as swift as it was incontestable. The first example of the

spread of the approach can be found without doubt in

Japan. The composer Mayuzumi Toshiro,39 who had

undertaken his studies in Paris, happened to hear a

concert of works of musique concre`te in May 1952,

following which he visited the studio of the Groupe de

musique concre`te. On his return to Japan, with the

collaboration of the radio JOKR of Tokyo

Broadcasting System, he created a work in three

movements directly inspired by this experience,

Musique concre`te for X Y Z.40 Even if this was not the

first Japanese electroacoustic work, for it was preceded

by the Etudes by Akiyama Kuniharu, it bore, through

its title, the sign of a strong relationship with the Paris

School. It is interesting to note that its method of

composition, in contrast, is highly personal and does not

follow the Schaefferian dicta of that period.

Promoting the confrontation of ideas about music

and the technological environment, the first

International Decade of Experimental Music was

35Pierre Schaeffer: intervention at the session of 27 February 1971,Bulletin de la Societe francaise de philosophie, no. 3, JulySeptember 1971, p. 108.

36Alexei Gan, Konstruktivismus (Tver, 1922).37Interview of Pierre Henry with Richard S. James, cited in

Expansion of sound resources in France, 19131940, and itsrelationship to electronic music, doctoral thesis, University ofMichigan, 1981, note 91, p. 79.

38See especially the well-documented works by Martial Robertpublished by Harmattan: Pierre Schaeffer: des transmissions a`Orphee (1999); Pierre Schaeffer de Mac Luhan au fantome deGutenberg (2000); Pierre Schaeffer: d Orphee a` Mac Luhan:communication et musique en France entre 1936 et 1986 (2002).

39Born in 1929, Mayuzumi Toshiro had been a pupil of Tony Aubinduring his studies at the Conservatoire in 195152.

40Mayuzumis work, myujikku konkureto no tame no sakuhin XYZ wasfirst performed in 1953 at the Tokyo Summer Festival.

What the GRM brought to music 193

organised by the Groupe de recherches de musique

concre`te.41 Here we find the pioneers who were essential

for the history of electroacoustic music. Vladimir

Ussachevsky, the delegate of the BMI,42 presented

there, having already undertaken some preliminary

trials in New York (since 1952) with Otto Luening,

before founding the electronic music studio at Columbia

University in 1955, the same year as the studio of

musical phonology by RAI in Milan. There too we

encounter Hermann Scherchen, who would establish a

studio at Gravesano in Switzerland in 1954; Pierre

Boulez; and Herbert Eimert, one of the co-founders of

the studio of the radio station NWDR in Cologne, who

had just organised its inaugural, concert.

As for the Paris studio, it attracted composers from a

variety of backgrounds who would experiment with the

technical capabilities of the studio. In 1951, Schaeffer

organised the first musique concre`te workshop, in which

Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraque, Yvette Grimaud, Andre

Hodeir and Monique Rollin came to study. Olivier

Messiaen, as a guest, was assisted by Pierre Henry to

create a rhythmical work, Timbres-durees, of a

respectable fifteen minutes length. Put together from a

repertory limited to repercussive and brief sounds, the

work was withdrawn from the catalogue. Be that as it

may, Messiaen gained a great respect for what

electroacoustic music could achieve, and one must not

regard his experience as having no effect at all. He was

followed by other composers of the same generation,

such as Darius Milhaud, whose La rivie`re endormie

(1954) evokes more the manner of the Horspiel than

that of musique concre`te through its sung passages,

spoken words and slightly altered instrumental music.

Edgard Vare`se made the first of the three version of

Deserts (1954) and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati pro-

duced Amen de verre (1957), a study, in which the

objects are slowly transformed according to the profiles

of the glissandi created by means of the sliding

phonoge`ne. Such glissandi also appear in Henri

Sauguets work, Aspect Sentimental (1957), but these

were recorded with a sliding flute; the author, who

had already produced two concre`te works (including

his Six pie`ces en un acte of 1955), loved to work with

a restricted palette made up of resonant sounds with

in delta43 profiles, and endowed with an allure of

dry or wet percussive textures as well as with human

breath.

With so many composers whose reputations were

already established, one could foresee that the

Schaefferian doctrine would not be followed to the

letter. For example, Jazz et jazz by Andre Hodeir,

a result of the early years of musique concre`te, is a

mixed-media work written for piano and three-track

magnetic tape.44 Certain others had already made their

compositional choices, such as Pierre Boulez, who

realised two etudes where he adapted concre`te processes

to the serial method. In the first etude, undertaken in

1951,45 Boulez chose to use the sound from only one

source, an African sanza, a thumb piano with metal

slats fixed on a small resonating case. Using the

keyboard of a C chromatic phonoge`ne, the composer

brought about changes of playback speed, which

produced transpositions in pitch and alterations in

duration simultaneously. He worked on the idea of

creating a scale of durations so that serial operations

could be applied. The second etude, undertaken a few

months later, followed his thinking about rhythm

starting with six types of highly varied sounds.46

Another concre`te work was destined for the experi-

mental film by Jean Mitry, Symphonie mecanique

(1955).

6. THE RESEARCH PHASE

The development of electroacoustic music that was

founded on the Schaefferian legacy needs to be

considered in quite distinct stages. These can be

arranged by the production modes of the works, which

are there to underline the composers discourse.

Schaeffers diary well illustrates how the imagination

is ceaselessly up against the restrictions of experimenta-

tion. Attempts multiply and happy accidents are

regularly produced. It is through the ear that

techniques are selected, later to become methods with

the capacity to astonish. In this way a repertory of

techniques evolved, many of which had not been

established in the radiophonic studio. The techniques

that are the most appropriate for the creation of

musique concre`te are remarkably few. They consist of

using the radiophonic studio technologies in special

ways. One may distinguish three classes of such

techniques. First, the alteration and transformation of

time; here the techniques are derived from the use of a

turntable, including segmentation (removal), accelera-

tion, slowing down, reproduction of sound back-to-

front, application of a dynamic envelope using a level

potentiometer, and repetition of a fragment (the

closed groove or loop).

41The Premie`re decade internationale de musique experimentalewas held in Paris from 8 to 18 June 1953.

42The American society for the rights of authors, Broadcast Music,Inc., was founded in 1939.

43See infra.

44See Marc Battier, 2006, Andre Hodeir et la realisation de Jazz etjazz, Les Cahiers du jazz, no. 3, p. 549.

45See the description given by the author in the letter to John Cage(n.d., c. December 1951, in Pierre Boulez, John Cage.Correspondance et documents, J.-J. Nattiez (ed.), Mainz: Schott;letter 35 in the original edition of 1990, letter 36 in the revisededition, 2000); see also Pierre Boulez, 1966, Eventuellement, inReleve dapprenti, Paris: Seuil, p. 177 seq.

46See Pascal Decroupet, 1994, Timbre diversification in serial tapemusic and its consequence on form, Contemporary Music Review,10 (2): 1223.

194 Marc Battier

After that comes transformation of texture and

timbre. Few techniques were applied during the early

years, and it was necessary to invent a number of devices

to support the process. In reality, perception of timbre is

modified by temporal operations, and thus to cut the

attack of a sound so that only the resonance or the

sustain fragment can be heard leads to the masking of

the original timbre. With the arrival of phonoge`nes,

treatments that work upon the timbre were to be the

result of speed variations, and the consequent transposi-

tions in time and pitch. These effects combined to work

upon the perception of the spectrum of sound. The use

of filtering as a form of treatment developed slowly as

was the case with other electronic devices for sound

manipulation, such as ring modulators or amplitude

modulators. These devices were only progressively

installed during the early years of the GRM. For one

thing, industry produced only a few of these devices,

and in addition they were seen as electronic objects

which worked against the philosophy of musique

concre`te. As other studios abroad began to employ

them fully (Cologne, Milan), the GRM was to

become sensitive to these means of transforming

sounds.

Finally, musique concre`te came up with a third

category, or at least found a means to experiment

through practice: spatialisation, that is, multi-channel

diffusion. In 1951 Jacques Poullin invented a music

stand for spatial application, which was used in a

concert shortly afterwards. Here one heard spatialised

works by Schaeffer and Henry (Symphonie pour un

homme seul, Orphee 51),47 and, by using a three-track

and six-spools tape recorder, a work by Messiaen,

diffused by Pierre Henry with three fixed channels and a

cinematic one, and by Hodeir with piano. After his

visit to Darmstadt during the summer of 1951, Schaeffer

published a statement on musique concre`te, and it is

amusing to note that he inserted this under the title Die

Klangwelt der elektronischen Musik. It was in relation

to this episode that he stated his position vis-a-vis the

approach of the German studio: I found we had many

common ideas with my German colleagues (we shared

the same curiosity), but I did not believe in their

elektronische Musik, all entirely turned, in my sense,

towards a means of execution which would have small

chance of renewing musical ideas.48 It is convenient to

mention here that the electronic music which made so

scant an impression on Schaeffer was not that with

which the Cologne studio is the most frequently

identified. In fact, during the studios early years, the

sources were not yet those of frequency generators, but

instead keyboard instruments: Harald Bodes mela-

chord and the Elektronische Monochord conceived by

Freidrich Trautwein. It was chiefly with the aid of these

keyboard instruments that the greater part of the first

etudes by Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer were made.

But then, Schaeffer shared with Henry little enthusiasm

for electronic instruments. One can find in this little

known historical event the origin of Schaeffers lack of

interest for the German electronic music.

7. THE RELAYED GESTURE I

The first act of relaying by the concre`te musician is

related to the machine. It suggests, by virtue of its

arrangement and its functions, possibilities of actions

related to a given real-world sound, such as is its

recording. But and here one goes back to the intuitionsof precursors such as Carol-Berard, the artist converts

these machines of reproduction into instruments of

reproduction. It is here that we interpose the idea of

reinvention: throughout the twentieth century the artist

has shown how he can transform the machine into a

basis for creation. When the gramophone changed its

status from being an apparatus for reproduction to an

instrument of production, an artist has, by thought ordeed, reinvented the apparatus.

This machine, in the Club dEssais studio, was above

all represented by the turntable, but it was also the

potentiometer of the mixing desk. In Schaefers hands,

the turntable in effect became the generator for unheard

behaviours of sound. They were thoroughly explored

and classified, and became the vehicle for the research

which led Schaeffer towards the conception of musiqueconcre`te: closed groove (made into a loop), speed

variation (transposition of pitch and tempo), reversal,

removal. Using the mixing desks potentiometers, ones

action leads to a new dynamic outline, which, in some

cases were able to mask the identification of the source:

the sound sheds its envelope and becomes disembodied.

The use of the turntable and its technical capabilities

is the mark of the first works of musique concre`te, asmuch with Schaeffer as with Pierre Henry. This

technology would be the one used up to Schaeffers

and Henrys Symphonie pour un homme seul. In fact, it

was during the work on this ambitious piece that the

first tape recorder arrived in the studio.

8. A QUESTION OF NAMING

At least Schaeffer hesitated over the choice of an

expression to describe what he had just invented: what

to call this new music, this anti-music. If he

definitively adopted the term concre`te, which he

justified elsewhere, it was because it evoked other

meanings, with reference to the association of ideas he

establishes between painting and music. His delibera-

tions drove him to establish a parallel between theevolution of painting since the beginning of the twentieth

century, which led from the figurative to the abstract. It

47At the Theatre de lEmpire, 6 July 1951.48Pierre Schaeffer. 1952. A la recherche dune musique concre`te,

Paris: Seuil, p. 113. See also p. 15 in the same work.

What the GRM brought to music 195

was the idea of the ductile quality of sounds which led

Schaeffer to this rapprochement between his discovery

and the visual arts. Seeing that it was comfortable toestablish links between musique concre`te and abstract

painting, that these were tangible and real, for all that

descriptive music is as illusory as musical painting.49 It

would ever after be possible to compose a concre`te

music that expresses the equivalents of matter and form

from the standpoint of abstract painting.50 This is why

he wondered whether he should not have chosen the

expressions musique plastique or even plastiquesonore (plastic sound).51

It was the poet Jerome Peignot who suggested toPierre Schaeffer an alternative name: acousmatic

music. This is what Peignot said:

To try and finish in good time with the expression

musique concre`te, why not use the word acousmatic,

taken from the Greek word akousma, which means the

object of hearing. In French, the word acousmatique

already describes those disciples of Pythagoras who,

during five years, only heard his lessons hidden behind a

curtain, without seeing him, and keeping a rigid silence.

Pythagoras was of the view that a simple look at his face

could distract his pupils from the teachings that he was

giving them. If one gives the word an adjectival form,

acousmatic, it would indicate a sound that one hears

without being able to identify its origin.52

This idea was relaunched by Francois Bayle fifteenyears later, when he applied it to the music of Paris

School.

This term, henceforth used in reference to the musical

work of the GRM, has to be extended through the

notion of acousmate, which gave a mystical dimension

to the phenomenon of hidden sound. Sound technolo-

gies have increasingly reinforced the idea of acousmate

as a number of great mystics have given witness,

supporting our listening to voices without bodies.Voices without bodies: this addresses itself to the idea

that with sound technology one can transport or

reproduce sound without its being associated with the

material that produced it. Historically, the idea of

acousmate is linked to mysticism. Here is what the

Dictionary of the Academie francaise says in its fifth

edition of 1798: ACOUSMATE. Noun singular. Noise

of human voices or instruments that one imagines onehears in the air.53 In his comments on the Academies

Dictionary, Antoine-Augustin Renouard wrote

Biographers have written that St Cecilia, ready for her

martyrdom, heard within herself the songs of angels,

from which derives her title as the patron saint of music.

If this historical point is correct, St Cecilia was in a state

of acousmate, or of enchantment, for these two words in

the language of learned metaphysicians, are essentially

synonymous. Both designate a mental condition, which

few physiologists know how to distinguish. The condition

is rarely morbid, sometimes endemic; but those who

suffer from it, when they are not saints, have often

imputed it to witchcraft.54

This definition by the Academie can be found copied

exactly in the notebooks of the young Apollinaire. The

poet gave this title of acousmate to two of his poems.

The first is a poem included in the Stavelot anthology,

and probably dates from 1899:

I sometimes hear the quiet voice of the absent55

In the second poem, also titled Acousmate, and

dating certainly to same period, Apollinaire wrote these

lines:

Shepherds used to listen to the speech of angels /

Shepherds used to understand all they thought they

heard56

This is the role now played by phonography, to make

voices without bodies or sounds without their causal

source heard: writers, researchers and poets all make

this attribution. The gramophone holds onto the

physical inscription. In giving it back, it leaves to the

listener the care of reconstituting the sound image which

traces the sound of origin. It is in these two tendencies,

restitution and recreation, that one finds the sources of

the creation of phonographic sound.

The occasion of the great turning-point that was the

creation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958

produced a change in the adjective of qualification:

henceforward one would speak of experimental music.

It was called musique concre`te, electronic music, electro-

acoustic music, music for tape, these synonyms which

initially designated, in principle, the same thing, indicated

at the same time certain tendencies not aesthetic, for I

take the word tendencies in the sense of the signifiers

which were consecrated to it. In taking as signifier music

for tape, one takes on the medium, one emphasises the

origin, on the instrument: the generator, the synthesiser,

and so on. In calling that music, musique concre`te, I

would emphasise, according to my way of thinking, on

the approach. In terming it electroacoustic music one may

find a synthetic term where the concrete sources (that is,

the microphones) and the synthetic sources are mingled,

as manipulations so often mix them.57

49Ibid., p. 114.50Ibid., p. 115.51For a development of this question, see Jean-Yves Bosseur, 2001,

Musique concre`te/peinture abstraite, in Sylvie Dallet et AnneVeitl (eds) Du sonore au musical, Paris: LHarmattan, p. 26177.

52Jerome Peignot. 1960. Musique concre`te, Esprit, no. 280,January, p. 116.

53Dictionnaire de lAcademie francaise, cinquie`me edition, Paris,1789.

54Antoine-Augustin Renouard. 1807. Remarques morales, philo-sophiques et grammaticales, in Dictionnaire de lAcademiefrancaise, Paris.

55Guillaume Apollinaire, Acousmate (jentends parfois une voixquie`te dabsente), Le guetteur melancolique, Stavelot, ca. 1899.

56Guillaume Apollinaire, Acousmate (Paix sur terre aux hommesde bonne volonte), Lacerba no. 9, 8 May 1915.

57Pierre Schaeffer, interview with Michel Chion, reproduced inCahiers recherche/musique no. 4, 1977, p. 122.

196 Marc Battier

9. CABIN OR STUDIO? THE GESTURE OR THE

MACHINE?

In their development, the activities of the studio had the

effect of opening up new questions that the composer

had to confront. Schaeffer had well foreseen this when

in the first pages of his diary58 he wondered whether it

was necessary to choose between the analogue sound

where one could find the electroacoustic equipment, and

the recording studio, a temple where the microphone

captured the resonances of the sound-producing

objects. Placing gesture as the primary consideration

in compositional practice was the decisive factor for the

Paris School: in order for the music in process of

gestation to find its sound shape, the composer draws

from a repertory of actions, controls, manipulations,

synchronisations and so on. He disentangles two

distinct routes: that of the recording studio, and that

of the analogue sound.

And it was the latter that was Schaeffers choice.

There he found himself among the turntables, the

mixer, the potentiometers and he could work through

interposed items. By contrast, it was the recording

studio that above all tempted the young Pierre Henry,

who thus created a new route for concre`te practice. For

him, electroacoustic music was an affair of gesture and

invention, and he would remain faithful to these

feelings. In 1970 he wrote Anyone who practices

Electroacoustic music invents his music, makes it,

makes it real, with his fingers.59

Schaefers preference was hence for the analogue

studio. He imagined a control device made from a

battery of turntables which he could steer at will. The

result of this technique was that the method of

composition made itself apparent by a process of

collage, where the items were superimposed upon each

other or followed one another without much effort of

articulation or transition. With the maturation of

thought, the question of finding means to combine

and articulate objects became a focus of the techniques

of montage. For that, it was possible to evoke

comfortably a procedure of electroacoustic writing,

where the musician proceeds without graphic inscrip-

tion but instead with a vocabulary of styles of gestures

and actions. It was thus that the idea was formed,

advanced and developed by Guy Reibel, concentrating

on sound producing objects and mechanisms. The route

explored by Reibel consisted of making an inventory of

the actions comprising the ways of playing, acting upon

a sound body, whether this was acoustic, according to

the concre`te tradition, or electronic, ignoring, in this

case, the means of recording or adapted interfaces. Thus

the idea of the instrument, not in a conventional sense,

was apt for the purpose of playing and exploring

gestures. Reibel asserted that the approach, undertaken

soon after his arrival at the GRM, conformed with

Schaefferian thought.60 In fact, one can see a sort of

struggle between the composers musical idea and the

sound-producing object that puts flesh on it even if thisis an electroacoustic device. An electronic machine, in

effect, is not a tool given to the musician without

encumbrances. Beginning with its own particular ways

of functioning, it has its range of possibilities as well as

its limitations, and can easily be resistant to the

composers wishes. The imprint of this compositional

strategy can be found in the work in six movements

Variations en etoile (1966).The basic question posed to the concre`te musician is:

ought one to act and understand later-on? To state it in

another way, can the gesture on the sound body, on

the potentiometer, on the machine work by itself to

make a musical character appear? Or rather, must it in

contrast apply a strategy aimed at unveiling the initial

intention through the gesture?

10. THE RELAYED GESTURE II

In order to explore the transformations of recorded

objects more elaborately, Schaeffer thought about

adapting the tape recorder, with which the studio had

only just equipped itself. Several machines were thought

of and produced by Jacques Poullin. There was the

keyboard phonoge`ne, made by the Tolana company,which would allow a magnetic tape in the form of a loop

to be played according to a selection from twelve

playback speeds. There was the sliding phonoge`ne,

whose effect one can hear in Orphee ou toute la lyre by

Schaeffer and Henry (1951). This was furnished with a

lever which assured a gradual change in the speed,

resulting in a sort of spectral and temporal glissando.

This was constructed by the Sareg company. Themorphophone would read a loop of magnetic tape with

the aid of ten heads which one could place along the

loop and be regulated at will: one might thereby produce

repetition according to a chosen rhythm. Finally, the

universal phonoge`ne, created in 1961, was an adapta-

tion of the principle of the machine developed in

Germany by Axel Springer, the Springer Tempophon.61

Its principle allowed one to work independently onspeed variation, resulting in an acceleration or a slowing

down, as well as the transposition of pitch. Its

manipulation was, however, very delicate.

Several works mark the phase that opened with the

founding of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. With

these works a new way of electroacoustic composition58See Pierre Schaeffer, 1952, A la recherche dune musique concre`te,

Paris: Seuil.59Pierre Henry, Le voyage interieur, Les lettres francaises, 8 May

1970, reprinted in Martine Cadieu, 1992, A lecoute descompositeurs, Paris: Minerve, p. 220.

60See Guy Reibel, 2000, Lhomme musicien. Musique fondamentaleet creation musicale, La Calade: Edisud.

61One can hear this in the work for tape by Herbert Eimert made inCologne, Epitaph fur Aikichi Kuboyama (196062).

What the GRM brought to music 197

began characterised by an effort to create a unity of the

material by inserting it into a formal, coherent

discourse. Schaeffer created two etudes which had as

their point of departure the desire to make a work

exploring a limited collection of objects, assuring a form

integration in the most musical way possible: the Etude

aux allures (1958), first, put into play a number of sortsof processing. One can clearly distinguish the action of

the keyboard phonoge`ne, whose playing produced a

kind of melody of resonances, of bandpass filters, which

cuts off the spectra of resonant rich sounds, apparently

coming from metallic plates crashing into one another,

just as from constructions of hybrid objects tied two by

two though editing, according to an outline of expan-

sion/contraction: these are the sounds in delta, a namegiven based on the shape of the Greek letter, which

became an electroacoustic pattern commonly used at

the Paris School. With the Etude aux allures (1958)

Schaeffer inclined towards a property of sound that he

characterised as its allure, which one might concisely

describe as a periodic or quasi-periodic movement

animating a sound, and which often depicts itself as a

sort of tremolo applied to different parameters ofsound. For the Etude aux objets, Schaeffer chose about a

hundred sound objects for which the puzzle the

challenge was to use them only in the crudest possible

way, relinquishing electronic treatment.

11. THE THEORETICAL EFFORT

In Paris the man of science who very soon attachedhimself to the studio was Abraham Moles. His

contribution was essential. It can be noted in 1952 in

an appendix to a work of Schaeffers, A la recherche

dune musique concre`te, with the chapter called Esquisse

dun solfe`ge concret (Sketch for a solfe`ge concret).

Gradually, Schaeffer forged what Hugues Dufourt calls

a philosophy of the sounding.62 To be a philosopher is to

create concepts, and this was exactly the purpose of histheoretical work.

In 1966 he published his treatise, the Traite des objets

musicaux, which Schaeffer said had taken him fifteen

years to write. He emphasised that it is not above all a

treatise on musique concre`te, it addresses itself to music

as such, but it is also an interdisciplinary essay.63

Running to 672 pages, the Traite develops his thought

in seven great books, themselves subdivided intochapters. Oddly lacking an index, its imposing size

making it difficult to consult, it was left to Michel Chion

to draw up a Guide des objets sonores,64 a work which

allowed many composers in France and abroad to grasp

Schaefferian concepts and integrate them into their own

approach.

The way one perceives the captured and recorded

object is the engine that drives concre`te invention.

Schaeffer gives this its name, reduced listening. This

expression evokes the attitude consistent with how one

regroups Schaeffers indices, under the condition that

the composers perception is concentrated on this

activity. Reduced listening allows one to disengage the

musical properties of the fixed object. In the Traite,

Schaeffer introduced the term acoulogy to designate the

act of isolating and of defining the musical character-

istics of recorded sounds. Thus defined, acoulogy was

intended to become the science of reduced sound.

Several years later, Michel Chion proposed to enlarge

the field of acoulogy and to present it as the science of

hearing in all its aspects (when with Schaeffer, it only

concerned itself with the dimension of sound related to

reduced listening).65 Chion proposed that the acoulogy

that he was advancing ought not to aim directly

towards a musical result, or a cinematic one, but instead

towards a more general, artistic goal. Its objective is

knowledge. The science thus defined would be, in the

geometric image that Chion gave as an example,

nourished by musical experience, rather than directly

serving it. Thus detached from the contingency of

artistic production, acoulogy would come to enlighten

all our listening. It would appear from this that the

vision of a science of listening, extended as Chion

suggested, is derived from Schaeffers suggestions about

how the concre`te musician, since before 1952, could

benefit from the particular technique of capture and

recording of sound. If all Schaefferian theory is directed

purposely towards musical practice that of radio-

phonic art as well as that of composition what Chion

teaches us is that what Schaeffer opened up can become

the most general one, paraphrasing a well-known

reflection in Schaeffers diary of 1952.

Acoulogy is the way to distinguish between two levels

of work. The first, typology, allows the classification of

sounds by types of objects. It leans on a specialised

vocabulary applied to the objects: continua, sustained

and discontinuous characteristics, provision of fixed or

variable mass, etc.66 The phase of typological examina-

tion produces a classification of the objects. The second

level, morphology, is the conceptual tool that categorises

the ways of describing the classification of the objects.

Schaeffer distinguishes between an internal morphology,

applicable to those objects which have a certain unity of

character, and an external morphology, when the sound

is composed of simultaneous elements differing in

62Hugues Dufourt. 1999. Pierre Schaeffer. Le son commephenome`ne de civilisation, Our, entendre, ecouter, comprendreapre`s Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, pp. 6982.

63Pierre Schaeffer, Un nouvel humanisme est laffaire daventur-iers, Les lettresfrancaises, 20 October 1966, reprinted in MartineCadieu, A lecoute des compositeurs, Paris: Minerve, 1992, p. 120.

64Michel Chion. 1983. Guide des objets sonores. Paris: Buchet-Chastel et Bry-sur-Marne, Institut national de laudivisuel.

65Michel Chion. 1998. Le son. Paris: Nathan, p. 274.66See Pierre Schaeffer, 1966, Traite des objets musicaux, Paris: Seuil,

p. 442.

198 Marc Battier

nature, even composite, made up from a number of

detached elements, yet stemming from the same source.

These ideas, together with all the multitude of others

which were disclosed but which are not discussed here,

were experimental. Intended to serve as the foundation

on which creation would be erected, they are of necessity

impregnated by the aesthetic choices of their inventor.

Schaeffer united them in his great project of a solfe`ge of

sounds, the proof that his ambition was to put together a

complete and coherent musical system, rivalling that of

the solfe`ge of notes. To better make them operative and

to spread them around, he undertook an enormous

catalogue of examples of sound, with a commentary by

himself.67 He was helped by Guy Reibel in this task, with

the assistance of Beatriz Ferreyra, Francois Bayle and

Henri Chiarucci. Many of the ideas were accepted by the

community of composers attached even indirectly to the

Paris School, and one finds them adopted in Anglo-

Saxon countries as well, where they spoke rather

strangely of concrete music to designate the natural

provenience of the sounds and their remoulding into

musical sounds, without necessarily following the

Schaefferian solfe`ge.

The Traite has been used as a pedagogical work, in

which one may try to use words to describe sounds and

to frame them into categories; this is illustrated by a

great number of sound examples with comments.

Undoubtedly it with this intention that the book is

most often read. Ironically, even though the taxonomy

is segmented into elementary categories, it is difficult to

find an approach based on these in many produced

works. By contrast, it presents a considerable effort to

give a universal approach to very different composi-

tional activities. It inspires admiration for what is a

unique large-scale treatise focused on its thinking that

the sound may come to substitute for the note as the

material from which music is made. Finally, and this is

often emphasised, certain properties of sounds found in

the Traite represent classifications currently in use; and

terms such as allure or grain, for example, have

become part of the vocabulary of electroacoustic music.

In the period during which he was preparing the

Traite as in the years that followed it, Schaeffer

requested the practice of Etudes as one of the foci at

the GRM, which he had inaugurated in 1948. This

insistence occupied the fourth position in the series of

methodological rules he articulated in 1957: Before

conceiving works, undertake studies.68 This was the

spirit Schaeffer proposed to the composers of the young

GRM, an experience which would find its first form of

expression in the Collective Concert.69 A kind of

revolution, this project requested a contribution from

all of the GRMs composers with regard to a single

question: what connection should there be between the

musical object and composition? Should one not place

the idea of structure before that of object? All

collaborators attacked this problem while Schaeffer

proposed the project of a concert which would be fed by

all of them. A veritable experimentation followed,

carried out on the question of structures, the operative

idea which acted like yeast in germinating musical

objects. Experimental protocols were brought to readi-

ness and each was applied to fill grids that evaluated

them in order to validate the effect of structures. But

when the results were analysed and discussed, it

appeared that the subject of musical structure had not

been of great importance and thus experience led to a

collective concert in which the composers at least those

who had accepted to participate in the experience all the

way through (it appears that there were ten),70 each

composed about ten minutes of music sharing the same

materials. The collective concert was a unique chance to

think together beyond the musical object. Up until then,

the act of composing used to be dependent on analysis

of how the material was listened to; Schaefferian

philosophy was contingent upon this. With the collec-

tive concert, the idea was to seek supplementary models

which inclined towards composition as an independent

activity. Iannis Xenakis, for a time responsible for the

programme, suggested a model based on combinatorial

theory for this occasion. This would lead to working on

the musical fragments made by certain composers with

those provided by others. The project then was

conducted through a sort of axiom that rested on a

formalisation of sound. Schaeffer stressed musical

structures which could work with the mathematical

models put forward by Xenakis; even though in so

doing, he was advancing indisputably towards a

structuralist approach. It therefore led to a series of

profound upheavals at the GRM.

12. THE RELAYED GESTURE III

The production of musical works, starting from the

early 1960s, developed afterwards, while Schaffer

undertook to put in place new teams of research: the

Group for Technical Research supported the develop-

ment of new electronic instruments and the Group for

Image Research focused on audiovisual questions that

would take on a growing importance for Schaeffer.

67This remarkable pedagogic exercise was first brought about byFrancois Bayle, Agne`s Tanguy and Jean-Louis Ducarme. Todayit is available on compact discs accompanied by the completetranscription in three languages. Paris, Institut national delaudiovisuel/Groupe de recherches musicales, 1998.

68Pierre Schaeffer. 1957. Lettre a` Albert Richard, La revuemusicale, no. 236, Vers une musique experimentale, p. XIV.

69On this subject, see Francois-Bernard Mache, Le Concertcollectif. Chronique dune experience 1963, La revue musicale,no. 3947, Recherche musicale au GRM, 1986, p. 1939.

70The participants in the Concert collective given on the 18 March1963 were Fr. Bayle, Ph. Carson, E. Canton, L. Ferrari, I. Malec,Fr.-B.Mache, J.-E. Marie, B. Parmegiani and N.V. Tuong.

What the GRM brought to music 199

The development of a device for electronic produc-

tion was the responsibility of Francois Coupigny,71 who

directed the Group for Technical Research. Coupigny

produced an ensemble of electronic modules designed to

generate signals and to process external sources. These

devices emerged in about 1969. Thereafter called the

synthesiser (a term which at the beginning they had tried

to avoid because it had a meaning that linked it to

electronic music), it became the heart of the new Studio

54 at the GRM; installed by Henri Chiarucci in 1970,

conveniently set up above the nerve centre of the studio,

the mixing console furnished the tape recorders with

remote controls. It served also as a model for a more

modest but portable unit, used for concerts up to the

present day. It was in this way that the compositional

environment of the GRM took the same path as other

studios in the world, namely that of automation. This

tendency began with the cybernetic inventions of Louis

and Bebe Barron in New York, and includes others such

as Raymond Scotts electronium (United States), Josef-

Anton Riedls Siemens studio in Germany, the Belgian

IPEM studio in Ghent, and the Dutch studio in Utrecht.

The GRM way of composing in part depended on the

technological environment in which it was deployed. We

have seen how the experience of microphone recording

can lead to a particular listening experience, and how

this act was relayed by the devices and machines

invented for composition.

Under these conditions, the question of musical

notation was posed in a way that had not been made up

till then, as the realisation of music had depended on the

employed production techniques. There are only a very

few examples of prescriptive notation in the Paris

School tradition. Schaeffer, in his first experiences, had

tried to note his figures of concre`te objects for his first

etude, but this tentative experiment was quickly

abandoned. It flows from his theory of the primacy of

the ear that the work should be composed as close as

possible to the material, and given that no instrumen-

talist is required, notation is of little utility. In the course

of training young composers, Schaeffer would ask

students to make etudes, stemming from schemes in

which the types of objects to be used were specified. The

most developed notation is that which offers visual

marks for the diffusion of works. Francois Bayles

concept of the acousmonium in 1974 hastened the usage

of notation: graphics, imposed upon a temporal axis,

allowed the diffusion of sounds at the heart of this

orchestra of sound projectors. For the Paris School,

notation was not something to be inscribed in the

conception but in the gesture. Even with the arrival of

computer technology, which forces one to specify exact

data, the gesture remained a focus with the creation of

the Syter digital machine.

But how did the GRM welcome the arrival of

computers? The development of digital music in Europe

was late and very gradual. The GRM was amongst the

first to invest in this novel and still somewhat

inaccessible technology. It fell to Francis Regnier toexplore the possibilities, despite the extreme caution

attached to it by Schaeffer ever since 1970.

During that period, the most developed software for

digital synthesis and processing was Music V, an

application in widespread use, developed at the Bell

Telephone Laboratories by Max Mathews and his

team.72 Jean-Claude Risset played his part in this. He

was the first to introduce it later in France, at theUniversite dOrsay. The program was placed at the

disposal of the GRM on a mini-computer. This

computer system was installed in the little Studio 123

at the Maison de la radio, which was near Studio 116,

dedicated to conventional analogue techniques.

The first attempt to distribute Music V among the

composers of the GRM failed. Seeing that it was

necessary to predetermine the data and code thingsexactly, the musicians could not find the equivalent of

the gesture. The answer to this setback was found in the

development of digital programs conceived to emulate

conventional processing of sounds. The goal was thus to

attempt to reproduce in software the manipulations of

the analogue studio so that composers would find

themselves in familiar territory. Benedict Mailliard, in

Studio 123, then defended the idea of a conversationaltype of programme. With this class of software the user

could choose the values of transposition and display

them as variables similar to conventional machines. One

calls this conversational because the software establishes

a dialogue with the musician and the latter responds

according to those choices that seem good to him. He

therefore works on an interface which, in the back-

ground, steers a number of processing programmes. Theset of resonant filters deserves a special mention,

because it became one of the most attractive tools and

because it represents an original contribution to digital

manipulation. The filters allow sounds to pass through

adjustable frequency bands up to a level where the

filter itself resonates and accompanies the treated sound

with a sort of spectral reverberation. Besides that, the

musician can freely choose the number of filters makingup the treatment set, as it is software-based and the only

limits are those of the machine: the gesture now takes

place in the virtual domain. One can hear this applied in

the first work that came out of Studio 123, Erosphe`re by

Francois Bayle. The sound editor restores the operations

of editing in the digital domain segmentation, collage

71Francis Coupigny. 2001. Sous la direction de Pierre Schaeffer:repe`res pour un parcours inventif. In Sylvie Dallet and AnneVeitl (eds) Du sonore au musical, Paris: LHarmattan, pp. 5560.

72Max V. Mathews, with the collaboration of Joan E. Miller, F.Richard Moore, John R. Pierce and Jean-Claude Risset. 1969.The Technology of Computer music, Cambridge, Mass.: The MITPress.

200 Marc Battier

of sequences. The software for temporal and spectral

processing, are manifold and varied: they derive from

the representation of sound in the digital domain, and

thus are not transposed computer versions of conven-

tional treatments.

The practice of using computer programs has only

partially modified this stance. Software manipulationdemands a form of coding of values. That very often

necessitates notation specifying at least a pre-existing

state. The GRM, after having tried to spread the use of

Music V, chose to create an environment based on

gestures.

From the middle of the 1970s, research at the GRM

led to the development of a program using a real-time

audio-numeric system. This was the Syter project(syste`me temps reel).

With Syter, composers had access to real-time and

interactive control of processing programs for digital

sound. The software developed for Syter was then

transferred to platforms of personal computers with the

GRM Tools program. This new package allowed the

treatment techniques in use at the GRM to become

accessible to a wide public of users.

13. ENERGY

A new phase of musical research was marked by the

arrival of Francois Bayle as director of the GRM in

1966, when Schaeffer devoted himself to other

functions. During nearly thirty years, Bayle was to

mark the compositional direction of the Paris Schoolwith his imprint. In 1997 he was succeeded by Daniel

Teruggi. This composer, who joined the GRM in 1980,

has put in place a clearly defined course of action,

which, as this article is being written, gives a new

direction to the GRM.

From Francois Bayles catalogue, one notes that

works of chamber music without an electroacoustic

dimension were the most prominent up to 1970. In thatperiod instrumental works, of which only some involved

magnetic tape playback, included traditional instru-

ments as well as less traditional ones such as the glass

harmonica, Baschet crystal, the Ondes Martenot and

the Hammond organ as instrumental sources thus

widened the spectrum of possibilities in orchestration

and of expression.

Two works were to launch the next phase of Baylianwriting. One was the suite for tape Jeta ou Murmure des

eaux, conceived in seventeen movements; the other,

more importantly, lExperience acoustique, between

1969 and 1971. Several major works followed, of which

Vibrations composees (1973), Grande polyphonie (1974)

and Camera oscura (1976) are the most important from

that period.

Bayle rarely resorted to live sources; writing for tapebecame systematic for him. A new form of writing

appeared, and one finds its source in the terminology

employed at the time. New terms blossomed in the

course of the 1960s. The majority referred to a sounds

cause: bounces, rustlings, evolving gestures. Certain of

them invoke the idea of flowing, or of surface: tissue,

fluid, hesitation. Others again allude to discontinuities:

fragmentation. Certainly, the idea of motion that was

present in Schaefferian theory in that period was

evolved further. New terms are borrowed from subtitles

of works, or from the writings of the GRMs composers

at the time. These choices reflected a new attitude

towards conducting sounds. Rather than inclining

towards the object with a view of examining its

properties, the sounds became forces influenced by the

movements that cause them. Among the representative

works are Bernard Parmegianis De natura sonorum

which is frequently quoted as exemplary of this period.

It breathed life into a new form of sonic analysis, and its

techniques of realisation as well as its stylistic assump-

tions are exposed in the work.73 The principle of the

work is to ally concre`te objects to electronic sources.

Putting these materials into an intimate relationship

sometimes creates a vertiginous fusion of texture and

tone, sometimes of radical contrasts. The magisterial

essay by musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez has shown

the poetic categories of it: starting from Nattiez

observations, one understands better how, in a work

like De natura sonorum, the nature of the musical object

has been transformed: the relations of energy are the

driving force of the constitution of objects. The sound

object became sonic material through a recorded

fragment. Musique concre`te, following the example of

the cinema, would proceed by putting together indivi-

dual sound sequences, usually short, especially the first

studies of noise in 1948. It was Francois Bayle who gave

form to a completely different conception. The voca-

bulary employed by this composer celebrates his

influences but also introduces his own new models.

One of the most important concepts in the process of the

refounding of the Paris School is the idea of morpho-

genesis, which Bayle directs towards the question of the

flow of energy that animates the sounds. Giving a

direction to composition towards certain dynamic

materials was for Bayle the means of generating sonic

forms in motion. The sound was thus liberated and the

style of composition at the GRM was completely

changed by this. Bayle made images of sounds emerge

from forms. These he named iSounds (iSons). The

thought around this concept, amply developed in his

work of 1993,74 is indeed a radical return to questions

related to the material, but also led to a deeply novel

73Jean-Christophe Thomas, Philippe Mion and Jean-JacquesNattiez. 1982. Lenvers dune oeuvre. De natura sonorum deBernard Parmegiani, Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut nationalde la communication audivisuelle.

74Francois Bayle. 1993. Musique acousmatique. Propositions positions. Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut national de lacommunication audivisuelle.

What the GRM brought to music 201

attitude towards composition. Managing flows, making

images emerge from sound all that evolved from the

end of the 1960s, but it is Bayle who translated the

compositional option into a conceptual formation.

It was during these decisive years that the composi-

tional tendency, designated by the term acousmatic

became stronger; the term approved by Schaeffer at theend of the 1950s (and which afterwards passed into

general use) was adapted to describe music recorded

onto sound media. This exists without any visual

information for the public. According to his own

theory, the effort of causal recognition collides with a

constant erasure organised by the creator. When Bayle

recovered the term in the middle of the 1970s, he

commented on the perpetuation of the model. One cansee by this action the choice between music recorded on

a given medium and other forms of musical presenta-

tion; for example, mixed music allying instruments and

an electroacoustic constituent without distinction either

through a medium or live, direct, which continually

expanded elsewhere during this period. Bayle promoted

the term acousmatic above all to make visible the new

theoretical status of the musical object. Schaefferquickly realised this, when he declared to Bayle that

until then the musical object gave life to time, but after

Bayle had further evolved Schaefferian ideas, it was time

that gave life to the musical object.

REFERENCES

Bayle, Francois. 1993. Musique acousmatique. Propositions

positions. Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut national de la

communication audiovisuelle.

Bayle, Francois. 2003. Limage de son. Technique de mon

ecoute/Klangbilder. Technik meines Horens. Munster: Lit

Verlag, Bilingual edition.

Chion, Michel. 1983. Guide des objets sonores. Pierre

Schaeffer et la recherche musicale. Paris: INA/Buchet

Chastel.

Chion, Michel. 1998. Le Son. Paris: Nathan.

Dufourt, Hugues. 1999. Pierre Schaeffer: le son comme

phenome`ne de civilisation, in Our, entendre, ecouter,

comprendre apre`s Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, pp.

6982.

Gayou, Evelyne. 2006. Le GRM, Groupe de recherches

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concepts, outils: une synthe`se, doctoral thesis supervised

by J.-Y. Bosseur, Universite Paris-Sorbonne.

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Schaeffer, Pierre. 1952. A la recherche dune musique concrete.

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Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traite des objets musicaux. Essai

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Teruggi, Daniel. 1998. Le syste`me SYTER. Son histoire, ses

developpements, sa production musicale, ses implications

dans le langage electroacoustique daujourdhui, doctoral

thesis, Universite Paris 8.

Thomas, Jean-Christophe (ed.). 1999. Our, entendre, ecouter,

comprendre apre`s Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel.

Thomas, Jean-Christophe, Philippe, Mion, and Jean-

Jacques, Nattiez. 1982. Lenvers dune oeuvre. De

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202 Marc Battier